TUMBLR 2010’S CORE

Are Eating Disorders only about performance?

The character of most girls who grew up in the first decade of the 21st century was partly shaped by the grunge aesthetic and pop culture of those golden years. Low-rise jeans, pop divas showing off their flat stomachs on the red carpet, diet tips in Vogue Magazine, and countless TV series and movies with body language critiques included in the script (almost all of them negative). Thinness was at its peak.

At the turn of the century, the number of cases of Eating Disorders worldwide doubled, affecting mostly women. With this new reality, major Hollywood productions could create characters and scripts incorporating an obsession with thinness, such as the timeless comedy “Mean Girls” (2004), which includes the scene where the villain Regina George is tricked by cereal bars that make her gain weight instead of losing it. But, looking closely, the dynamic of the group of friends is terrible: teenage girls frantically counting calories, starving themselves, and associating their social worth with their body measurements. The film satirizes this, portraying eating disorders as a fad of rich and popular girls, something totally silly on television.

In contrast to the aforementioned villain, another complex character from the “Skins” series emerged: Cassie. The character is the perfect portrayal of how eating disorders are rarely about vanity. Cassie’s parents are so self-absorbed that she becomes invisible within her own home. For her, not eating isn’t about conforming to a beauty standard; it’s a silent cry for help. To understand the complexity of Cassie’s mind and eating disorders, it’s necessary to delve into their roots, into what causes this disturbance in girls around the world, a problem that persists to this day.

The Root of Everything: Emotional Eating For most girls, the beginning of an eating disorder starts long before the first comment about their body; it’s born in the cradle. From the moment we arrive in the world, our culture has a mania for resolving any discomfort with food. If the baby cries, the immediate response from adults is usually: “They must be hungry,” if the child throws a tantrum, they get a sweet to be quiet. Without realizing it, we are taught from a very young age that any imbalance — be it colic, boredom, or loneliness — can be cured with food, when, in fact, all that child needed was the affection of their caregivers. It is in this confusion, where food replaces nurturing, that the first distortions begin.

If food already runs the risk of becoming an emotional bandage in healthy childhood, in dysfunctional homes this scenario worsens. Children who, like Cassie from Skins, grow up invisible at home or face exclusion in the school environment, have greater exposure to eating disorders. When it involves even more violent traumas, such as physical or sexual abuse, the mind goes into survival mode.

The big problem is that everything gets worse in adolescence, with hormones running high, the identity in formation means that all that pain stored in childhood needs to come out somewhere. As the young mind often cannot process such great traumas, the body becomes an expression of this pain and the eating disorder manifests itself as an unconscious response. For some girls, it emerges as a desperate cry for attention, an attempt to make the suffering seen by absent parents through extreme physical change. For others, it becomes a search for control in a difficult life where they are not in charge of anything, and food becomes the only territory under their command. There are also cases where the disorder functions as self-punishment, stemming from the unfair guilt that abuse victims often carry, whether related to food deprivation or overeating. Therefore, psychology can find various explanations for these disorders, which manifest in diverse ways.

Similar Causes, Distinct Disorders If we look at Cassie’s story from this psychological perspective, everything starts to make sense. The lack of parental attention and emotional emptiness don’t just generate “sadness”; they impair the functioning of the mind. What’s most striking is realizing how the same basis of neglect or abuse can cause a teenager’s mind to branch out into three completely different responses.

When a young woman like Cassie suffers from a lack of attention or carries the trauma of abuse, her mind may understand that her body is the problem. In anorexia, the logic is: “If no one sees me, I’ll really disappear” or “If my body was abused, I’ll punish it and make it the worst possible so that no one else touches it.” Because Cassie doesn’t receive affection from her parents, she focuses on controlling food; not eating brings a feeling of superiority and emotional numbness. The mind functions like a dictatorial system; feeling hungry and resisting it becomes the only victory in a life full of suffering.

Bulimia is a portrait of a mind at war. Considering that a lack of affection creates an unbearable void for the adolescent, it makes sense that she would desperately fill this hole (the feeling of abandonment or the pain of abuse) with food. But, soon after eating, guilt arises from the fear of losing control or being rejected. That’s where purging comes in (vomiting, using laxatives, or extreme exercise). The bulimic mind operates on the basis of punishment; the person tries to “cleanse” not only the food from within, but also the dirt and shame left by the trauma. It’s a secret cycle of seeking comfort and punishing oneself for having sought that comfort. Unlike bulimia, binge eating disorder doesn’t involve purging, which makes the situation much more socially judged. Faced with stress, loneliness, or memories of abuse, the mind seeks the pleasure of food to hide the pain.

From Emotional to Physical: Eating disorders are not just emotional suffering, they change brain chemistry. When the body goes through long periods of severe restriction or cycles of bingeing and purging, the brain goes into malnutrition and chronic stress that directly affects the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for impulse control, decision-making and critical judgment. This area suffers a partial “shutdown”, which explains why the young woman loses the ability to understand the seriousness of her situation and why it is impossible to break the cycle of the disease through sheer force of will. Furthermore, there is a dysregulation in neurotransmitters, serotonin levels (responsible for mood and satiety) fall, generating anxiety, depression and obsessive thoughts. The dose of dopamine, which is responsible for the feeling of reward and pleasure, is also affected: In compulsion, the brain starts to depend on food like a drug; In anorexia, the brain starts to release relief substances when the person is hungry, becoming something chemically addictive. At the end of the day, an eating disorder is not “fancy” and it is not “just eating”, it is a serious condition that should be taken seriously.

The Impact on Social Life The consequences of an eating disorder go far beyond physical damage; they destroy the identity and freedom of these girls. Food begins to dictate all social rules, and social isolation becomes an escape. Going to a birthday party, going out to dinner with friends, or participating in family lunches becomes a source of anxiety, causing them to prefer locking themselves in their own world rather than having to explain what they are (or are not) eating. This isolation extends to their love life; the avoidance of romantic relationships is like a barrier. Imagine these girls trying to allow themselves to feel affection from another person when they are terrified of their own bodies, ashamed of themselves, and have a mind that repeats, 24 hours a day, that they are not enough? In the case of women with eating disorders, all of this is even stronger, given that we live in a society where we are exposed to an unattainable beauty standard.

The Healing Paradox This paradox is the most complex part of the entire treatment process. To an outsider, it seems obvious that the person should want to get better, but the mind of someone with an eating disorder doesn’t work the way other people think. The truth is that a girl with an eating disorder lives trapped in a toxic cycle between the desire to get better and the fear of recovery. On one hand, there is the exhaustion from suffering, isolation, lies, and all the various consequences. On the other hand, the idea of ​​being “normal” and healthy generates panic; recovery doesn’t just mean going back to eating, it means giving up the only form of control and comfort she has found to cope with life. Furthermore, there is the attachment to image, and giving up the disorder means, in her mind, giving up a body she has come to consider ideal. The disorder ceases to be just an illness and becomes an identity, which is why the rehabilitation process is so difficult for both the victim and those trying to help her.

But is it really a performance? In the 2010s, social media contributed to the transformation of eating disorders into a desirable aesthetic. Blogs with tags like #proana (pro-anorexia) and #promia (pro-bulimia) had millions of followers who shared photos of skeletal bodies with poetic phrases of melancholy, cigarettes, marked collarbones, and photos of Cassie from Skins herself. But why did this happen? At a stage in life when teenagers felt invisible and misunderstood (the same triggers of abandonment mentioned before), Tumblr offered a welcoming space. There, extreme thinness and sadness ceased to be symptoms of an illness; belonging to that group meant being seen, being part of a subculture that understood their pain, turning into a melancholic and cultured lifestyle.

In Reality It’s Not a Performance Tumblr and the internet tried to convince us otherwise, creating an aesthetic where anorexia seemed like a poetic drama and bulimia something rebellious, as portrayed in films and blogs. But the truth is that eating disorders are not a performance, not a cult drama, and have absolutely nothing aesthetic or super cool about them. In real life, what exists are teeth rotting from stomach acid, hair falling out, heartbeats failing due to malnutrition, and girls locked in bathrooms crying. There’s no glamour in having your brain chemistry affected by the panic of a piece of chocolate. Reducing a psychiatric illness to an “aesthetic” or a role to be performed on the internet is a disrespect to the pain of thousands of girls! We need to stop looking at eating disorders as a life choice and start seeing them for what they really are: a cry for help that needs treatment, support, and above all, healing.